Jack Whaley became only the second Englishman to win the US Amateur Championship since 1911 as he beat American Jay Leng Jr 4&3 at Merion.<\/p>\n
Victory will give the 22-year-old a place in the field for the Masters, US Open and The Open at St Andrews in 2027.<\/p>\n
Whaley, who attends Florida State University, came into the contest as a major underdog against Leng Jr, who is 23rd in the world amateur golf rankings, some 67 places higher than the 22-year-old from Doncaster.<\/p>\n
The on-course form looked to be following the rankings as Whaley slipped two down after the opening 18 holes in Sunday’s 36-hole encounter.<\/p>\n
However, Whaley fought back superbly, making back-to-back birdies on the second and third holes of his second round on his way to winning four holes consecutively.<\/p>\n
With rain lashing down in Pennsylvania, both players took two of the next six holes before Leng Jr misread a putt on the 12th to hand his opponent a three-hole lead.<\/p>\n
Whaley rounded off his win with a superb left-to-right putt for birdie at 15 to become the first English amateur to triumph in the US Amateur since Matt Fitzpatrick in 2013.<\/p>\n
Prior to Fitzpatrick, Harold Hilton had been the last Englishman to won the title in 1911, with Scotland’s Richie Ramsay (2006) the only other British winner since 1898.<\/p>\n
Fitzpatrick went on to follow up his success at The Country Club in Brookline by winning the US Open on the same course in 2022.<\/p>\n
Former US Amateur winners include Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Bryson DeChambeau and Viktor Hovland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jack Whaley became only the second Englishman to win the US Amateur Championship since 1911 as he beat…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":740573,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-740572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/740573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}